‘Rossini was very strict about his music and this is one of the problems we have nowadays because it’s so difficult to perform,’ says conductor Mark Elder. ‘In Rossini’s music there is no fat, there’s nothing you can hide behind. It’s either perfect or it’s disappointing.’

‘The first quality of Verdi’s operas is drama; Donizetti’s is charm and beautiful melodies; with Rossini, it is rhythm,’ explains Elder. ‘The rhythms in his music seem to be more important than anything else. That’s not to say he didn’t write beautiful melodies or wonderful ensembles, but everything that everybody does is powered by the sense of rhythms. They have to crackle.’

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What makes a stage? It can be behind a proscenium arch, in the round, at the base of an amphitheatre, a clearing in a crowd, almost anywhere – but it must, for a time at least, provide a clear definition between the area for performance and the area for the audience. The expectations engendered by such a set-up and how they can be usurped – most obviously the breaking of the fourth wall – has long been a source of delight for playwrights and directors. In their production of Il babiere di Siviglia, directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier go to town with the idea – but always take their inspiration first from the masterful comedy contained within Rossini's score.

Christian Fenouillat's set design gives us a large box that fills almost the entire width of the proscenium arch. Its smooth, doorless sloping walls are somehow reminiscent of a cathode-ray tube television, while the oversized footlights perched at the front of the box further assert that this is to be our performing space – a big 'look here', expressed in both 20th- and 19th-century terms. But wait! With no doors, how are our performers to reach the stage? The answer depends on two specific responses to the score put forward by Leiser and Caurier: the first about Figaro, and the second about Rosina.

The first idea jumps on the bandwagon of a reading of the opera that has been popular almost since the opera's premiere. Here the, impulsive, energetic, near-omniscient, near-omnipotent and fundamentally jolly barber Figaro is a simple cipher for Rossini himself. Figaro is at the very least clearly on a different plane from the other characters – not actually really involved in or motivated by the events (apart from for cash reward), but an orchestrator who is crucial in driving the action. He is a creator, not a pawn in the composer's game.

It only makes sense, then, that he should be unbound by that theatrical box. For his first entrance, Rossini gives Figaro arguably the best tune in the opera, 'Largo al factotum'. Accordingly, Leiser and Caurier have Figaro enter from the auditorium, dashing down the orchestra stalls to leap triumphantly onto the stage. Not so for characters further down the pecking order. Take the hapless servant Fiorello, who has had to hustle an entire orchestra (complete with double bass) over the high back of the box to land in a muddle at the bottom. Even the aristocratic Almaviva has had to clamber on from the side. The directors make clear the hierarchy implicit in Rossini's score, while also heightening the absurdity of this archetypal opera buffa – Fiorello's desperate attempts to hush the orchestra, unfeasible in any setting, become especially futile here.

The second of Leiser and Caurier's responses looks at Rosina's sad situation. She is being kept incarcerated by her guardian Don Bartolo, who plans to marry her and keep her for himself. Thus she sings her first aria 'Una voce poco fa' within the box, now closed at the back as well to really emphasize the point. No windows, no doors, no nothing, apart from a chair and some darts that Rosina can hurl against those smooth walls. It's an absurd exaggeration, again in keeping with the farcical nature of the work – but one that does also reflect the pathos of Rosina's imprisonment.

So how do the other characters get on stage? Magically doors slide up, a staircase appears from nowhere, and all snap down again the moment their function is fulfilled – delightfully surprising and hilariously mean. We stay within this magic box for the rest of the opera – for the Act I finale, where the box is raised and tipped about in direct expression of the rank confusion; for Rosina's seething temper storm; and for the happy ending. Even this affords the characters no escape – but then, this is the only place they come to life.

Despite that fact that you can wear what you want to the opera, few people sit in their seats with raincoats and umbrellas. From what happens on stage this is surprising: opera is full of bad weather.

Since classical times, storms have been used as a narrative device to push characters into situations of conflict. In Virgil’s Aeneid, a storm at sea shipwrecks Aeneas on the shores of Carthage, where he begins his doomed affair with Carthage’s queen, Dido (portrayed in both Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Berlioz’s Les Troyens). The Act I chorus of Mozart’s classically inspired drama Idomeneo, ‘Pietà, numi, pietà’, portrays sailors desperately praying to the gods as wind and waves threaten to overwhelm them. Mozart’s music is in a minor key and with repeated cries from the sailors for mercy (‘Pietà’), while the violent elements are represented with woodwind in whirling, continuous scales and strings playing tremolando. The music moves to the major key with a lighter texture, then a pause – and salvation. But the abatement of the storm came at a price – Idomeneo’s vow to sacrifice the first person he meets on shore, who turns out to be his own son. As in the Aeneid, the storm drives the story.

Rossini liked to score a good storm and there are several in his operas. In Act II of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rosina has been driven to despair because it looks as though her lover ‘Lindoro’ (Count Almaviva in disguise) has deserted her. As so often in dramas, her bad mood invokes bad weather. It is a purely orchestral piece, and Rossini represents the gradual change, beginning with clouds and the first spots of rain through initial low rumblings interspersed with short flute flourishes. The rain starts lightly but builds in intensity: brittle string notes to which flute is added for the effect of increasingly dense drops of rain. The thunder and wind arrive: full orchestra chords, rushing scales. But the storm quickly blows over, as does Rosina’s temper.

Storms can be more than a reflection of one character’s bad day. In Act III of Verdi’s Rigoletto the storm becomes a manifestation of Fate: a higher power that mortals can influence no more than they can control the weather. There are hints of the impending storm at the start of the scene in which Rigoletto pays Sparafucile to kill the Duke of Mantua. The cheerfulness of the Duke, heard singing out of sight, and the rumblings of the incipient storm become subsumed into the increasingly menacing tone of the following events. The rising and falling chromatic chords (heard with an offstage chorus imitating the wind) is one of the most instantly recognizable recurring meteorological features.

Sudden, loud chords and a cymbal crash reflect the thunder and lightning as well as the dramatic tension of the events. The peak comes as Gilda's first knocks at the door are matched by chords representing lightning and thunder: she knows and we know that knocking for entrance to the inn signals her doom. The prolonged rumble of the timpani is both thunder and impending death. The weather is not an imposition from outside, but a psychological expression of what is inside.

The rise of the storm at the start of the scene is mirrored in its dispersal at the end as the musical motifs gradually unravel and reduce: the murder has been committed. Distant sounds of the retreating storm are heard fleetingly as Rigoletto arrives to gloat over his revenge on the Duke – distant thunder from the timpani and high woodwind flurries of dispersing rain. But the storm is no longer the focus, for the final few bars reveal the awful truth that Rigoletto has brought about the murder of his own daughter.

Rigoletto runs until 6 October 2014. Tickets are still available.Il barbiere di Siviglia runs until 5 October 2014. Tickets are still available.Idomeneo runs from 2 to 24 November 2014. Tickets are still available.

By Rossini's time it was a long-established convention that the first-act finale of an opera buffa should be come at a height of imbroglio (part of the genre's debt to French farce). This finale was the composer's opportunity – indeed, obligation – to take the various plot lines and tangle them all up, leaving characters and audience hopelessly confused. The Act I finale of Il barbiere is actually not one of Rossini's most complicated – try Il turco in Italiaif you really want to twist your brain in knots – but it doesn't do a bad job.

The lovelorn Count Almaviva is attempting to woo Rosina, ward of the jealous geriatric Doctor Bartolo (who intends Rosina for himself and keeps her locked away). On the advice of Figaro the barber, Almaviva has inveigled his way into Bartolo's house disguised as a drunken soldier in search of lodgings. The aim (admittedly slightly contrived) is for Almaviva to give Rosina a letter, while using his pretended drunkenness to bewilder Bartolo.

From the immediately preceding scene we have an idea that Bartolo might not be so easily foxed: his furious aria 'A un dottor della mia sorte' ('To a doctor of my standing') – in which he rails against Rosina's disrespect – is a masterful depiction of a self-important, pernickety bully. So when Almaviva staggers onto the stage to an orchestral melody of barefaced impudence, we have an unmistakable signal that the flood of imbroglio is on its way.

Bartolo does not respond well either to Almaviva's impertinent melody, or to his imposition, or to his insouciance: ('What was the name? Balordo (stupid)? Bertoldo (blockhead)?'). Bartolo's agitated outbursts do nothing to deter Almaviva's confident melody. Rosina's arrival makes it worse, as Bartolo (rightly) suspects the two to be secretly communicating. Confusion deepens when the servant Berta and the music teacher Basilio enter – and finally Figaro too, with a warning to Almaviva that he may have been over-zealous in his performance.

It turns out the police have been called, and soon enough there's an entire brigade on the doorstep. The officer's enquiry launches the patter song 'Questa bestia di soldato' (This beast of a soldier). The patter song is a recurring type in opera buffa: very rapid, text-heavy music, usually sung by a baritone. Bartolo, the opera's buffo baritone, accordingly sets this one of; but then he's joined by another baritone, Figaro; and then by all the others – so we have a patter song, usually difficult enough to understand when sung by one person, sung in imitation by all six principals. That the officer can reply to all this with a simple 'Ho inteso' ('I understand') is almost more ridiculous than the song itself.

In a daring key change, Almaviva evades arrest by showing his aristocratic insignia to the officer, who deferentially steps back. There follows another ensemble, of a form often referred to as the 'largo concertato'. Rossini was an expert in using these a slow ensemble section with minimal accompaniment, to ratchet up the tension. Rosina begins this section, marked ‘quadro di stupore’ (as in a stupr), frozen and breathless, describing how she's so shocked she can't move. She is joined one by one (in very elegant imitation) by the other characters, as we build towards the stretta.

The stretta, a common feature of finales of this period (defined loosely as a fast closing section), is here made by Rossini into a huge continuous crescendo – a form he was so fond of it's even earned the generic term 'Rossini crescendo'. Starting the final vivace section sotto voce (in a quiet voice) and in unusual unison, the cast agree how terribly confused they are – matched brilliantly in The Royal Opera's production by the entire set seeming to take leave of its tethers and rock dementedly about. It's a thrilling, bewildering, ridiculous ending, and one that shows Rossini at the height of his comedic powers.

Papageno and Pamina are trying to escape Sarastro’s temple when they are interrupted by the villainous Monostatos. Luckily, Papageno strikes up a sprightly dance tune on his magic bells, whose sound comes from the glockenspiel. Monostatos’s fury vanishes in an instant, and he and his minions, enchanted, dance away happily singing. Papageno and Pamina comment that magic bells like these would surely cure the ills of the world.

Nemorino, inspired by the story of Tristan and Isolde, has purchased an ‘elixir of love’ (in fact, cheap Bordeaux) from the quack doctor Dulcamara. He believes that he has only to drink the elixir for his adored Adina to fall for him within 24 hours. As the wine goes to his head Nemorino feels cheerful. When Adina arrives, he pretends to ignore her, and breaks into song, his merry ‘la-ra-las’ accompanied by strumming strings. Donizetti wittily contrasts Nemorino’s jolly wordless melody with Adina’s growing irritation, as she tries to get his attention and – for once – is ignored.

‘Den Tag seh’ ich erscheinen’ (The day I see dawning) from Act II of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner

The pedantic town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser’s attempts to serenade the beautiful Eva Pogner, but his efforts are constantly interrupted by the cobbler Hans Sachs. With the excuse that he has to finish Beckmesser’s shoes in time for the next day’s singing competition, Sachs marks each of Beckmesser’s musical and poetical faults with a stern blow of his hammer. Wagner cleverly contrasts Beckmesser’s pompous song – accompanied by faltering mandoline, full of florid ornamentation and awkward rhymes – with Sachs’s dry comments. And then it turns out that Beckmesser is serenading the wrong girl anyway!

‘Gonzalve! Gonzalve!’: Duet for Concepion and Gonzalve from L’Heure espagnole by Maurice Ravel

Concepcion’s arranged a romantic rendezvous with the poet Gonzalve while her elderly husband Torquemada is out. But things aren’t going her way. First she has to get rid of the muleteer Ramiro, who wants his watch mended. Then when Gonzalve arrives he’s more interested in declaiming florid poetry (depicted by Ravel in swooping vocal lines and grandiose orchestral crescendos) than getting down to business. Concepcion isn’t impressed and makes frantic attempts to get Gonzalve to concentrate on love-making – but to no avail.

‘There’s no need to fear’ and ‘Up! Drink! Up!’ from scene 3 of Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti

The grim reaper Nekrotzar announces that he will destroy the world at midnight, and recruits the wine-taster Piet the Pot and the astronomer Astradamors to help him. Piet and Astradamors suggest a last feast – washed down with plenty of wine. They dance round Nekrotzar, shouting and insulting him in a jolly folksong-like tune, and order him to drink. Nekrotzar initially prefers to make pompous apocalyptic pronouncements in sonorous tones, but is tempted by the smell of alcohol. The music dissolves into a demonic trio, with jazzy syncopated rhythms and thudding percussion, as Piet and Astradamors continue to mock ‘Tsar Nekro’, and he doggedly downs wine, accompanied by loud orchestral hiccups. The scene soon collapses into anarchy. The following aria, sung in code by the crazed Gepopo, Chief of the Secret Political Police, gives you an idea of the kind of anarchy Ligeti can conjure!

What are your favourite comic moments in opera?

Die Zauberflöte runs 23 February–11 March 2015. Tickets are still available. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from The Jean Sainsbury Royal Opera House Fund.

No critic in Rossini’s lifetime espoused a neutral view of the composer, especially in Paris where ‘Rossinistes’ and ‘Anti-Rossinistes’ waged a war of words that kept his name in front of a gossip-thirsty public. Enthusiasts praised the abiding freshness of his music, its wit and dazzling vocality. But detractors eyed Rossini’s immense popularity with suspicion, accusing the composer of being facile, superficial and excessive: ‘theatrical’ in the worst sense of the word.

While Rossini surely took the expedient route on occasion, he was also quick to offer a penetrating justification for his choices. In an 1836 conversation with his friend Antonio Zanolini, he ruminated on the relationship between words and music, stressing music’s role as the abstract ‘moral atmosphere that fills the place in which characters of the drama represent the action’.

Another way to look at Rossini’s artistic decisions is through the lens of the Italian theatrical infrastructure, which was deeply tied to commerce and in the service of both pockets and egos. An opera composer under contract to theatres had little autonomy; he was expected to churn out multiple works each season in a continuous stream of novelties that were immediately fed to publishers who marketed piano-vocal scores barely after the last musical echo died out in the opera house. But the astonishing successes that emerged from this framework defy the seemingly low regard for artistry that such mass production could engender.

The challenge for Rossini (and any of his contemporaries) was to work within this system; respect a capricious audience (which had no compunctions about expressing its reactions spontaneously and loudly, as the composer found at Il barbiere's 1816 premiere); and preserve his ideals. Rossini was a deft player of this game, especially in Naples, where he composed ten operas that memorialized their singers in a succession of virtuoso roles. He was lauded as a superb dramatist who could maximize the potential of any given text; his ‘theatricality’ a product of complete engagement with all the materials, processes and opportunities that the musical stage had to offer.

With Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rossini turned to a subject that fellow composer Giovanni Paisiello had already set to music in 1782. Comparisons were inevitable, and Stendhal, firmly in the Rossini camp, offers a pungent rebuttal to the expected claims about Paisiello’s superiority: ‘If Rossini was deficient in some of the virtues of Paisiello, he was also completely deficient in the dullness which too often afflicts the latter’s style.’

The alleged weaknesses may have originated in Paisiello’s ingenuous fidelity to Beaumarchais, especially in the opening scene where the composer translated, perhaps too literally, the playwright’s pair of monologues into two discrete musical numbers sung back to back by Almaviva and Figaro. Rossini took a quite different approach, transforming the succession of solo pieces into a hilarious ensemble parody of a stock balcony scene, complete with serenade.

It is just before dawn as Fiorello (Figaro) urges his large band of musicians to be quiet. Could the absurdity of beginning an opera with shushing also be a ‘futile precaution’ to the often very noisy and inattentive early 19th-century audience? Instruments are tuned and Almaviva hopes to awaken Rosina with gentle song: ‘Ecco ridente in cielo’. Here Rossini mocks his own gifts for vocal display in what amounts to a superficial expression of chivalry and little more. What kind of man, intent on wooing a woman (who is still sleeping, no less), hires an orchestra for such an intimate task? Answer: a painfully naive one, who thinks that more is more. But the real punchline of the scene is Rossini’s whimsical homage to theatre itself: Rosina, who continues to sleep despite the noise, is no Juliet and does not appear at the window.

This is an extract from Helen Greenwald's article 'Gioachino Rossini, Man of the Theatre' in The Royal Opera's programme book, available during performances and from the ROH Shop.Helen's article is the first in a series of three written to accompany the three Rossini operas performed this Season. The next article, on Rossini and comedy, will be printed in the programme for Il turco in Italia.

Count Almaviva has arrived in Seville to woo a beautiful woman he glimpsed in Madrid. But, unbeknownst to the Count, Rosina is due to be married to her guardian, Doctor Bartolo, the next day. Can Figaro, the quick-witted town barber, bring about a happy ending?

Second Time Lucky

Gioachinio Rossini’s Il barbiere is the earliest opera to have remained constantly popular on the international stage. But its premiere, in Rome on 20 February 1816, was a disaster. Licking his wounds in a letter to his mother, Rossini said: ‘My opera was solemnly booed’. But by the second night the audience had changed their mind and the composer had to acknowledge their applause five or six times.

A Creature of Society

The first version of what would become Pierre Beaumarchais’s play Le Barbier de Séville was called Le Sacristain and included musical movements. When it was rejected by the musical theatre of Paris in 1772, Beaumarchais rewrote the work as a spoken social comedy. Rossini and his librettist Cesare Sterbini then transformed Beaumarchais’s neighbourhood schemer into a quick-witted facilitator who’s at the heart of the town’s secret affairs.

Il barbiere is peppered with show-stopping arias that let the opera’s performers flex their coloratura muscles. The most famous, is Figaro’s opening aria – the fiendishly fast ‘Largo al factotum’ from Act I scene 1. It follows quick on the heels of the elaborately decorated 'Ecco, ridente in cielo', with which the Count unsuccessfully serenades Rosina's window. No less impressive, though, is her ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Act I scene 2 in which she lets the audience in on a secret or two. One of the highlights of the opera, though, comes in Act II scene 1, when the successfully united couple spend so long singing a love duet, their ladder has gone by the time they try to escape through the window.

It's a performance that has passed into Covent Garden legend: In July 2009, American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato slipped during the opening night performance of The Royal Opera's Il barbiere di Siviglia, breaking her leg. Not only did she finish her performance as Rosina that evening, but also went on to perform in every scheduled performance of the run, singing from a wheelchair.

'The minute I went down I knew something quite tremendous had happened. I assumed it was a sprain, but I knew I couldn't put much weight on it,' she reflects. 'I crawled off the stage and got some ice on it immediately. The Royal Opera House staff came to my rescue and I hobbled through the rest of the show with the aid of a crutch, but more importantly with the aid of my wonderful cast, who gave me a chair when I needed it, held my arm when I needed it. They were champions in helping me get through the show.'

'The curtain came down and I plopped down in a chair, got some ice in my foot and happily someone gave me a glass of champagne which helped take the edge off for a moment! Then I was whisked away to the emergency room where the doctor informed me that I had broken my fibula. I was surprised but then it was my turn to shock the doctor, when I told him I had stood on it for three hours for the remainder of the show. That apparently is the opposite of what you're supposed to do!'

Joyce was then presented with a number of options for the remaining performances of the run, including being replaced by another Rosina. Such was her desire to perform for her audience, that she opted to sing from a wheelchair - quite a challenge in a production that involves a large cast and a set that tilts back and forth and features a scene when Rosina destroying the entire set!

The creative team decided to adapt the production to accommodate Joyce's chair, which she soon found she was surprisingly comfortable with. She also found the challenges of adapting the staging opened up the character of Rosina even more: 'It flowed pretty well - singers came down to the edge of the stage to converse with me, and I found a way to give character to the chair. What we ended up with was something extraordinary.'

Group Booking for the Autumn Season 2014/15 opens on Tuesday 1 July, two weeks ahead of general booking on the 15 July.

Group Booking offers savings of up to 40% on some of the world’s best opera and ballet, and allows you to secure excellent seats for the best prices.

A total of five Royal Opera productions, two Royal Ballet mixed programmes and three full-length ballets are included in this Season's Group Booking offers, making it the ideal chance to introduce friends and family to opera and ballet. Offers apply for groups of 10 or more.

Other benefits for group bookers include a ‘book now, pay later’ arrangement and a dedicated group booking phone line. Furthermore, if bookings are confirmed by 1 August, patrons will receive an extra 5% discount.